Prompt #35 — Write Like Gene Morgan

The oft-mumbled misanthropic curse, “fucking people” is transformed beautifully in Morgan’s piece (view here). He imagines a world in which sexual intercourse overcomes people in the oddest scenarios—an ambulance, an ice cream parlor, four cops in a mall. The story is an acceleration of fucking people, transforming the adjective “fucking” into the verb. Morgan deftly decides to end on the most mundane and common version of coitus, “a person and a person, in bed, fucking,” and a reader could determine that the piece, by disarming gender in that moment, becomes a rallying cry for sexual equality.

PROMPT

Take a common cliché or other phrase and translate it literally. What if it actually rained cats and dogs? Who would clean it up? Would there be any survivors? Would it be a supernatural event or scientifically explained? Whatever phrase you take, exhaust the grammatical and real world implications of its structure, but be sure to use concrete objects and real world items! As Williams Carlos Williams said, “No truth but in things!” Feel free to use that as another potential cliché.